Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

A Distant War

By David Abrams

As United States troops crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq, heading north on their “thunder run” to Baghdad, I was as far away from the battlefield as you could get. I was a staff sergeant stationed in Alaska on a desk job, and I felt completely disconnected from what was happening halfway around the globe. That day, my unit had an early-morning formation for our physical training, all of us dressed in sweats, balaclavas and shoes fitted with spikes to keep us from slipping on the icy roads. As we ran, our breath crusting the balaclavas with frost, I thought of my fellow soldiers in Iraq who were at that very moment heading into the dark unknown of combat. But I didn’t think of them as people, as fighting machines of flesh, blood and bone; they were icons on a battle map, avatars in a video game, images from a news report. The war was not real. It was a movie I watched from the distance of the frozen north.
It wasn’t until 2005 that Operation Iraqi Freedom would turn personal. That’s the year I deployed to Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division—many of them soldiers returning for their second tour of duty. These were the same troops I’d de-personalized in my thoughts two years earlier. In the coming months, I’d see some of them walking around with dried blood on their uniforms and a hard, tight expression on their faces. I was ashamed I ever thought of them as anything less than human.

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David Abrams in Kuwait, Jan. 2005.Credit Emily Wilsoncroft

In December 2011, I was once again mentally divorced from the battlefield. I’d been out of the Army for three years and by this point it was not only in my rear-view mirror, it was a mere speck on the horizon. And so, when I heard our exit from Iraq was complete and the last man out the door had turned off the lights, I gave a virtual shrug and moved on to the next news story. I don’t even remember the exact moment the war ended, that’s how softly it finished. Maybe I thought about eight years of bombs and blood, maybe I sighed, maybe I said a brief prayer for the dead. Or maybe I flushed with shame at the way I’d once again put the war at a distance.

DAVID ABRAMS served in the United States Army from 1988 to 2008. He is the author of “Fobbit,” a comedy about the Iraq War, and is a contributor to “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War.” He lives in Butte, Mont., with his wife.

Mother of Truth

By Roy Scranton

Sometime in the night, I wake to the sound of gunfire. Angry shouts of crowds massed around weary Americans—Rangers huddled in a dusty ghetto. Somebody screams.

We’re on night duty in the barracks, Charlie Battery, Strassburg Kaserne, Germany, manning the phone 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. Usually nothing happens. Usually the hardest part is fighting off boredom. I’ve got homework to do, anyway, for my online course in Roman history. I have to write a paper about the Varian disaster, in which Germanic tribes slaughtered three Roman legions.

It’s quiet now in the mountains. I go outside and stand in the cold, smoking a cigarette, under the grim eye of the Wehrmacht eagles watching from our World War II-era barracks. Down in the motor pool, enormous tracked launchers stand idle. We’re a cold war unit, rocket artillery, built to fight the Russians.

One of the reasons I’d joined the Army after 9/11 was that I wanted to see what history looked like as it happened. Here in Germany, though, everything belongs to another era. The “Global War on Terror” remains distant, abstract, obscure.

I startle when a figure blooms out of the dark. He’s a shadow in woodland camo and I’m slow to recognize his face.

“Check it out,” the duty runner tells me. “We just invaded Iraq.”

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On I.E.D. patrol in Baghdad in 2004.Credit Roy Scranton

Princeton University, December 2011. The war’s over, they tell me on NPR, just before I head out the door. I’m already late, might just have time for coffee, but I wheel back and check the news online. I’d heard right.

I’m supposed to be on campus in 15 minutes to talk to freshmen about writing about war. One class at 9, another at 11, spend the afternoon on research, then the English department party at 5.

Iraq drops away and everything wobbles. I’ve been out now longer than I was in, yet the war had remained constant the whole time, a kind of white noise against which my life stood in contrast. Even if I’d moved on, or thought I had, my relation to the war defined me. That’s gone.

I had thought I would read the kids a story of war to plug them into the moment. They’d feel, through me, a charged connection to events a world away. Now I realize, walking out the door with both relief and loss, that all I have to offer is history.

Lessons

By Andrew Slater

On the day the invasion of Iraq began, my company of paratroopers gathered at the airfield before dawn. We were about to begin a nine-day combat mission — “Valiant Strike” — to clear the remnants of the Taliban from the Sami Ghar mountains in Zabul province, Afghanistan, about 50 miles south of the spot where I’d get hit by an I.E.D. six years later. Until that week in March, we’d been the only brigade in the Army in actual combat, which is hard to imagine now. By 2007, there would be more than 20 brigades in action.

We searched villages dawn to sunset every day for a week, living out of our rucksacks. We were handing out hand-crank powered radios to Afghan villagers and it occurred to us that we should use one ourselves to listen to the news. As exhausted as we were each night, we took turns around the radio to catch the news from BBC Quetta about the new war beginning to the west. I remember hearing about the helicopter that crashed in Kuwait on March 20, killing 12 soldiers, and wondering how bad the invasion would be.

Our mission seemed to go on forever and we joked about the war in Iraq being over before we even got back to Kandahar. None of us realized then that we would be in the streets of south Baghdad just 10 months later, in a very different kind of fight.

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A patrol of south Bagdhad, April 2004.Credit Andrew Slater

When the war “ended,” I was in graduate school, also unaware at the time that nine months later I would be returning to Iraq — this time as a school teacher. I left the service in 2010, after my fifth deployment, to get a master’s degree. I put scare quotes around the word ended, because having come back, it is clear to me that the war has only ended for the Americans. I live in the relatively safer Kurdish region of northern Iraq, teaching English composition at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. Things are calmer than they were, but Iraq isn’t safe yet. Baghdad is still a city of checkpoints and blast walls, even if my students tell me there’s also a shopping mall now. The car bombs and killings keep happening, and even if the pace has slowed, the memory of the bad years keeps the fear here alive. It is peace without relief.

ANDREW SLATERwas an Army infantry and special forces officer from 2000 to 2010. He was deployed five times— three to Iraq and two to Afghanistan. He is a lecturer of English composition at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani. His fiction has appeared in Epiphany: A Literary Journal and in the anthology “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War.”

NEXT: “A War, Before and After, Part 3.”

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.